A Howard Watson Intrigue

According to the International Energy Agency, China is a significant culprit in CO2 emissions (c ombustion of coal, natural gas, oil, and other fuels, including industrial waste and non-renewable municipal waste on the globe (30%), and the United States is in second place with 16%. Anthony Barnoski, executive director of Stanford University's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve , and a global expert on extinction said three years ago “that we humans have, at the very most, 20 years to change the way we treat nature, or we will bring about the sixth mass extinction event in the entire history of Earth.” Climate Disasters. Climate Change. Global Warming..not much difference in definition as we humans are murdering the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil for planting, creating shipping disasters and assisting in the extinction of many of our animals. The devastating drought in Zimbabwe has seen over 200 elephants die, zebras grazing grounds being decimated a

 Coming Spring 2020 -   The Scheduler (A Howard Watson Intrigue) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "The old law about an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind." Five men have been targeted for death by someone trained on an M-24 sniper rifle..a rifle that only the military provides. The person or persons unknown is an expert shot. Howard Watson i s an FBI Supervisory Special Agent in Charge in Washington, D.C., and his friend and colleague, Allen Knox , is one of the two targets on the offenders' list who escapes the deathtrap. What do these five men have in common that has garnered the wrath of the shooter? The FBI Profiler will offer her insight. Howard Watson will be forced to realize  t hat mental illness is a scarring disease that can leave a healthy person blemished, and sometimes with fatal results. #joannfastoffthewriter #mysteryandintrigue #howardwatsonsonthecase #womenmysteryandintriguewriters #blackwomenmysteryandintriguewriters 

The rain was heavy. Why didn’t I wear my ugly shoes? Samantha tried walking around the large puddles on the sidewalk, but they were too numerous to avoid. Her $300 heels were now soaked. She waited at the corner for the light to turn green. A car turned right in front of her and splashed gallons of water on her and others. She let out a sigh of exasperation. This new dress and these new shoes will not see the light of day at the banquet! The day had begun on a much more promising note. Melissa had called and offered a shared trip to The Caribbean. Like always, she somehow had managed to get some unsuspecting man to fund her dalliances in the sun. A week at an all-inclusive where the most complicated decision to be made was what drink to order sounded just about right, especially since the calm, blue skies of earlier in the day had transformed to an apocalyptic deluge. Skipping the banquet was not the best career move, but attending in dripping silk plastered to the

First Thanksgiving? Isn't it ironic that there is little coverage of whether November is Native American Heritage Month or that November 23rd is Native American Heritage Day? Wow, one whole day! "First Thanksgiving" was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World in October 1621. This feast lasted three days and was reported by Edward Winslow, who wrote that it was attended by 90 Wampanoag Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims. What wasn't being written were the massacres of Native tribes like the Pequot that took place in the years that followed the so-called "First Thanksgiving." It seems no one mentioned that English settlers robbed Wampanoag graves and stole food from their storage to survive their first years on the new continent, America. The same Wampanoag greeted them with food for three days in November 1621. It's possible but unlikely that there was a turkey on the first Thanksgiving. More than likely

Duty, Honor, Country Plebe that I was West Point Academy was originally established as a fort that sits on strategic high ground overlooking the Hudson River,  with a scenic view about 50 miles north of New York City.  It is one of the five U.S. Service Academies .  Tuition for cadets is fully funded by the Army in exchange for an active duty service obligation upon graduation. Approximately 1,300 cadets enter the Academy each July, with about 1,000 cadets graduating. The idea of attending West Point Academy didn't hit me until my junior year in high school.  By that time my dad and I were bonafide political opposites. The Vietnam War was raging and I had the nerve to want to go to a military college. Go figure. My father would have liked to hit the roof but decided at nearly the last moment to refrain from doing so, as he would only be hurting himself. In addition to the required excellent grades and test scores for admission to West Point, a candidate must recei

CIA Friends This piece will be short and sweet because I only have two CIA friends: Officers Allen Knox and Trent Michaels. To be honest, I don't know if I could call Trent a friend per se,  maybe a little more than an acquaintance...but I like his peculiar take on things. The CIA and FBI are both members of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The CIA, however, has no law enforcement function. The CIA collects information only regarding foreign countries and their citizens. Unlike the FBI, it is prohibited from collecting data regarding "U.S. Persons," a term that includes U.S. citizens, resident aliens, legal immigrants, and U.S. corporations, regardless of where they are located. Of course, I'm not about to tell Knox this. He and I have worked on several missions together. In The Smoke Ring case ,  he helped the FBI tie up strings that might have been missed had he not been on board. In The Standing People  case, Knox's resources were unbelievably

Alberto Marino - the best.boss.ever. I'm going to write this as if Al won't ever see it. Unfortunately, he sees and knows everything, so it will only be a matter of time before he'll call me into his office and ask me to "stop putting the light in my face". Alberto Anthony Marino was born in an Italian ghetto in New York City.  Al likes to say it was ironic because the word "getto'' was first established in the 16th century in Venice, Italy.  His paternal uncle worked on New York's waterfront for over 30 years and would tell him often as a kid that he remembered  suffering the consequences of the anti-Italian sentiment that had spread like wildfire once the United States entered World War II.   His uncle's only crime was being born in Italy. But during the early years of World War II, that was enough to classify him as an “enemy alien”.  Even Joe DiMaggio’s parents in California weren’t spared from harassment, though their son